DeepSeek changed the calculation. When the House Select Committee on China concluded in early 2025 that the Chinese AI company had trained its flagship model on restricted Nvidia AI chips that should never have reached it, Congress stopped treating chip smuggling as an enforcement failure and started treating it as a legislative emergency — one that arrived on the House Foreign Affairs Committee's desk, this week.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Chip Security Act with bipartisan support on Thursday, advancing legislation to curb the smuggling of American semiconductors to foreign adversaries. The bill was introduced in May 2025 as a direct response to concerns raised by the...